Why Enterprises Are Accelerating Their Move to SAP on the Cloud
As cloud computing continues its meteoric rise, more and more enterprises are looking to transition their critical business systems and processes to the cloud. One of the major enterprise software vendors accelerating its adoption in the cloud is SAP. But what exactly is driving enterprises' rapid migration of SAP to the cloud?
Legacy on-premise SAP systems presents several pain points for enterprises. Research shows that a typical SAP implementation can take 24 to 36 months and cost anywhere from $250,000 to over a few million. The total cost of ownership keeps rising every year, with expenses related to managing infrastructure, bugs and errors, integrating various components, and expanding as the business grows.
Indeed, 88% of SAP customers find it hard to innovate within legacy systems, and 82% of companies had unplanned downtime over the past three years that cost millions in lost revenue and productivity.
Digital transformation is gaining ground everywhere, so the inflexible legacy of the on-premise model cannot shackle enterprises. The cloud promises solutions to these pain points.
In this comprehensive guide, you will learn:
- Pain Points of Legacy On-Premise SAP Systems
- Key Capabilities Offered by SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- Top Drivers for Enterprises to Move SAP to the Cloud
- What is Involved in Transitioning from On-Prem SAP to Cloud
- Best Practices for a Successful Migration to SAP on Cloud
Now, let's get more info on why enterprises are increasingly moving their mission-critical SAP workloads to the cloud.
Pain Points of Legacy On-Premise SAP Systems
SAP implementation in the traditional on-premise approach presents several challenges to modern enterprises trying to stay competitive in the highly evolving markets. These legacy systems, which, at some point in time, were the key to enterprise operations, are now sources of impediments to growth, innovation and business agility. Several critical areas of impact are constrained by the legacy SAP deployments in terms of technical operations and business outcomes:
- Inflexibility and Lack of Agility
- Lengthy Upgrade Cycles
- Spiraling Total Cost of Ownership
- Integration Challenges
- Suboptimal User Experience
- Unplanned Downtime and Security Risks
These have been more than mere technical inconveniences but strategic barriers that can greatly hamper an organization's ability to compete effectively. The architecture of legacy systems is rigid, which has cascading effects throughout the enterprise, where you cannot quickly change and respond to market changes, missing opportunities and putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Many software development companies face these same challenges with legacy on-premise architectures, prompting them to seek more agile, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions.
1. Inflexibility and Lack of Agility
Companies that use legacy on-premise SAP systems find it challenging to respond quickly to changing business conditions or new opportunities. Every minor improvement, integration, or addition requires considerable time and effort. This inflexibility is because SAP's traditional architecture consists of monolithic and complex modules interconnected over costly enterprise hardware and databases.
The lack of agility hampers innovation. The intricacies of modifying legacy SAP systems dissuade enterprises from driving innovations through new apps, analytics or user capabilities.
2. Lengthy Upgrade Cycles
While SAP releases multiple software updates annually, few customers upgrade promptly due to the headaches of scheduling downtime, dealing with disruptions to business continuity, and managing the risks of something going wrong. A recent Gartner survey found that 33% of SAP users had bought or subscribed to licenses to start their transition to S/4HANA.
Postponing upgrades prevents enterprises from benefiting from innovations. It also builds up technical debt that makes future upgrades even more cumbersome. Legacy customizations made over decades further complicate things. This phenomenon of lengthy upgrade cycles poses real barriers to business agility.
3. Spiraling Total Cost of Ownership
The total cost of ownership for on-premise SAP landscapes is exorbitant between license fees, infrastructure costs, consulting expenses, and internal IT support teams. Notably, SAP announced a 5% increase in annual on-premise software maintenance fees, effective from the beginning of 2024.
Ongoing costs accumulate from maintaining and upgrading servers, databases, storage, security tools, backup systems, etc. Expanding SAP to additional sites or new lines of business leads to further increases in TCO.
4. Integration Challenges
Getting end-to-end processes to work across interconnected SAP modules or with external systems is complicated, time-consuming and costly. Custom coding and complex interfaces are required for order-to-cash workflows spanning order management, planning, manufacturing, logistics and billing processes across CRM, ERP and supply chain modules.
Due to these complexities, it is very hard to adapt or optimize a process that spans across multiple systems when business needs change. Not supporting the ecosystem for legacy versions also makes it difficult to integrate with modern apps and data sources that enterprises want to use.
5. Suboptimal User Experience
Aging SAP software versions rarely deliver the user interface and overall experience expected from contemporary consumer tech products. Therefore, employee adoption suffers, training costs increase, support tickets increase, and productivity decreases.
Workflows requiring users to jump between multiple applications and interfaces lead to particular frustration. Inadequate management contributes to 47% of unsuccessful software projects, emphasizing the critical role of effective user adoption strategies. This drives a desire among business executives to move to modern cloud-based SAP platforms.
6. Unplanned Downtime and Security Risks
The mission-critical nature of SAP systems means unplanned downtime can bring operations to a standstill and compromise vital business data. Keeping all components updated against the latest threats is extremely challenging. Lack of visibility across endpoints further heightens risks. Mitigating these reliability and security pitfalls presents huge burdens.
Key Capabilities Offered by SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP S/4HANA Cloud represents a paradigm shift in enterprises' deployment, management, and leveraging of SAP solutions to drive business value. Unlike its on-premise predecessors, this cloud-native platform was architected from the ground up to address legacy systems' fundamental limitations while enabling new capabilities that align with the demands of today's digital economy.
Therefore, S/4HANA Cloud is about reimagining SAP's core function through a cloud-first lens to provide a complete set of transformative capabilities that go well beyond simple hosting advantages. SAP's process management heritage is reinforced by the optimal platform, which combines the robustness of any SAP offering with the agility, scalability, and innovation potential provided by modern cloud architecture. This powerful combination unlocks numerous capabilities that directly address the pain points of legacy systems while creating new possibilities for business transformation:
- Business Agility Through Flexibility
- Lower TCO with Subscription Model
- Accelerated Innovation Cycle
- Intuitive Consumer-Grade User Experience
- Built-In Integration and Extensibility
- Uptime Reliability and Robust Security
- Ongoing Enhancements Without Disruptions
After examining key gaps with legacy on-premise SAP products, let's explore how SAP S/4HANA Cloud addresses these constraints through an agile, flexible, continuously updated cloud platform.
Business Agility Through Flexibility
SAP S/4HANA Cloud's modular architecture allows enterprises to begin small with top scenarios, grow usage as needed, and grow easily without disruptive changes. Adding a new site, line of business, or functionality is easy.
Drag-and-drop configuration enables rapid modifications to adapt processes or UX without coding. Integration with apps or data sources is visual and codeless. This agility helps enterprises respond swiftly to emerging challenges and opportunities.
Lower TCO with Subscription Model
The subscription-based pricing of SAP S/4HANA Cloud eliminates large upfront capital expenses while shifting from a fixed to a variable cost model based on usage. Not having to purchase, install and maintain enterprise hardware and databases on-premise provides massive TCO savings.
Enterprises also avoid expenses related to specialized SAP resources, as the SaaS model means SAP runs in the cloud. Instead of spending capital and resources on running SAP, companies can allocate them to innovation and growth.
Accelerated Innovation Cycle
With continuous updates delivered, SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers immediately benefit from the latest innovations in machine learning, predictive analytics, robotic process automation and more integration by SAP. This eliminates delays in waiting for upgrades.
SAP also rapidly rolls out new capabilities based on the latest market needs. The extensive platform extensibility further fuels custom innovations via apps and interfaces that seamlessly interoperate through open APIs.
Intuitive Consumer-Grade User Experience
The SAP Fiori user experience, redesigned from the ground up, delivers consumer-grade ease of use with responsive layouts, guided workflows, role-based personalization and consistency across devices. SAP Fiori offers everything end users expect in modern apps to drive adoption.
Built-in integration eliminates jumps between disparate UIs, enabling intuitive processes like procure-to-pay. Analytical dashboards, conversational UIs and contextual recommendations raise productivity by helping people make better decisions.
Built-In Integration and Extensibility
SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides pre-built integration to SAP CRM, HR, supply chain solutions and the broader SAP Business Technology Platform ecosystem. It enables frictionless connections with payroll, PoS, inventory and other external systems via APIs and microservices.
Line-of-business teams can build custom apps on the platform, leveraging capabilities like artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, and the Internet of Things without dependency on IT. This extensibility and integration accelerate the realization of innovation ambitions.
Uptime Reliability and Robust Security
SAP provides 99.9% uptime availability for S/4HANA Cloud, with end-to-end SLAs based on infrastructure management. Hardware failures or disasters cannot cause outages if there is redundancy in data centers. Built-ins include identity management, data encryption, vulnerability testing, advanced threat detection, and rapid security patches that close the windows of exposure.
Ongoing Enhancements Without Disruptions
SAP S/4HANA Cloud releases incremental improvements weekly and new features quarterly, and there is no business disruption or system downtime. With machine learning-driven innovation, the latest automation and analytics capabilities are available on the platform to the customers without any delay.
Real-World Success with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Migrations
The transformative potential of SAP S/4HANA Cloud is compelling, but validation through companies that actually adopted this new generation platform builds credibility and value for it. In industry, the accelerant to digitization is the movement of enterprise core processes, the key to most businesses, to the cloud, achieved through rapid deployment at a quick time to value.
Global snack food leader PepsiCo was on a mission to leverage a 'digital at scale' strategy powered by SAP S/4HANA Cloud. PepsiCo rapidly began turning around critical merchant planning processes with solutions designed for the food and beverage industry. Dashboards deliver real-time visibility into promotions, and machine learning optimizes trade spend. This agility has driven double-digit improvements in business KPIs.
Leading furniture retailer IKEA similarly adopted SAP S/4HANA Cloud as the core of its global growth platform. With preconfigured best practices for retail and consumer products baked in, IKEA was able to implement a complex two-tier ERP landscape on schedule during the pandemic. The subscription-based pricing also enables flexible scaling to expand to new markets easily.
Saint-Gobain, a world leader in building materials, migrated its businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa to SAP S/4HANA Cloud in just 14 months. By consolidating 45 ERP systems onto a single platform, Saint-Gobain gained end-to-end visibility while accelerating decision-making through embedded analytics like ML-driven forecasts.
Read about global enterprises ranging across industries that have adopted SAP S/4HANA Cloud to quickly transform business processes, rapidly introduce innovation at scale, embrace simplicity and achieve user adoption through intuitive experiences, as well as move from capital expenditures to a subscription and without the need to spend extended downtime, while maintaining business continuity.
With proven success powering digital transformation for industry leaders, SAP S/4HANA Cloud's track record of rapid time-to-value, smooth migration and measurable business impact makes it a compelling proposition for forward-looking enterprises seeking to reimagine their core systems for the digital age. The business agility, accelerated innovation velocity and simplified user experience offered by this next-generation platform position companies to achieve operational excellence today while embedding intelligence to fuel future competitiveness.
Top Drivers for Enterprises to Move SAP to the Cloud
After seeing how SAP S/4HANA Cloud addresses legacy on-premise SAP constraints, let's examine the key drivers propelling enterprises to accelerate their shift to SAP on the cloud:
- Need for Business Agility and Responsiveness
- Focus on Innovation-Driven Growth
- Imperative to Reduce IT Cost and Complexity
- Support for New Business Models and Changing Market Dynamics
- Availability of Proven Cloud Technologies and Delivery Models
- Retiring Risk-Fraught Legacy SAP Systems
The drivers of these businesses reflect the changing priorities of modern enterprises in an increasingly complex and dynamic business environment. Whereas ERP systems are traditionally viewed as process-efficient and standardization tools, this more strategic view of these systems now considers them enablers of business transformation and innovation.
1. Need for Business Agility and Responsiveness
Given voluntary and uncertain environments, enterprises need to sense and react rapidly to them to exploit nascent market opportunities and counter threats posed by competitors. These SAP systems are too rigid and inhibit this responsiveness. The flexibility and agility to transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud is provided through the rapid configuration capabilities.
2. Focus on Innovation-Driven Growth
Enterprises realize success by harnessing future-focused innovations in areas like AI/ML, IoT, automation and advanced analytics to differentiate offerings and processes. However, legacy systems drain the focus and resources needed for innovation initiatives. By running SAP S/4HANA Cloud, companies free up time, money and attention to drive innovation.
3. Imperative to Reduce IT Cost and Complexity
With margins under pressure, enterprises need to optimize IT costs and enable digital transformation ambitions simultaneously. Moving to SAP S/4HANA Cloud substantially reduces TCO compared to legacy SAP while providing a future-proof platform for innovation as a service from SAP.
While SAP S/4HANA Cloud lowers TCO compared to legacy systems, the economic benefits are not only about cost reduction. Using the subscription model means moving from fixed to variable costs as you go with your use.
Enterprises avoid expenses by not having to spend money on hardware, databases and SAP-specific resources. In addition to putting a dent in the budget, less downtime (as 82% of companies suffered costly unplanned downtime on legacy systems) saves money, facilitates less expensive training because of their improved user interface, and frees up resources that can be reworked towards innovation efforts aimed at growing revenue.
4. Support for New Business Models and Market Shifts
Through SaaS delivery on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, enterprises can adapt to or launch new business models, such as direct-to-consumer, digital products, subscriptions and data monetization, that traditional systems are unable to keep up with.
5. Availability of Mature Cloud Technologies and Delivery Models
Having proven successes of SaaS and public cloud models with SAP S/4HANA Cloud offers enterprises even greater confidence that their mission-critical workloads (e.g., SAP) can safely be moved to the cloud.
6. Retiring Risk-Fraught Legacy SAP Systems
Continuing security vulnerabilities, integration headaches, user frustrations, upgrade delays and runaway costs push enterprises to shift legacy SAP systems to S/4HANA Cloud despite fears around change. The long-term benefits outweigh the short-term migration pains.
What is Involved in Transitioning from On-Prem SAP to Cloud
Now, considering that we have covered the key drivers accelerating the migration of enterprise SAP systems to the cloud, let us get into details about what the transition process entails:
- Planning and Scoping
- Design and Prototyping
- Data Migration
- Testing and Training
- Go-Live and Support
Each phase builds upon the previous one, creating a progressive path toward cloud adoption that manages risk while accelerating time to value. Throughout this journey, organizations must balance tactical considerations—such as data integrity and system performance – with strategic objectives related to process optimization and business capability enhancement. The most successful transitions treat cloud migration not as an IT-driven technical exercise but as a business transformation initiative with technology enablement at its core.
Partnering with experienced cloud consulting companies can help enterprises navigate these complexities, offering expert guidance on migration planning, process redesign, and risk mitigation throughout the SAP cloud adoption journey.
1. Planning and Scoping
This phase focuses on charting out current business processes, defining future process architecture aligned to industry best practices, identifying transitional challenges, outlining migrations strategy, calculating TCO differential and building executive alignment on the roadmap.
The scoping process starts by assessing the existing on-premise SAP landscape, from the core ERP, CRM and supply chain modules to various bolt-ons, custom objects, interfaces and extensions. This evaluation quantifies the technical debt that will be retired via the migration.
Then, business processes are mapped end to end, from procure to pay, order to cash and manufacture to deliver, along with supporting capabilities for finance, HR and payroll. Optimal processes are identified versus gaps.
Then, the future process architecture is designed based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud's flexible configuration canvas and pre-built best practice process templates. Changes across modules, roles and end-user workflows are estimated to have an impact. The migration strategy is shaped based on the assessment of transition complexity.
A detailed comparison of the TCO between retaining legacy systems and moving to S/4HANA Cloud is constructed based on license costs, infrastructure expenses, IT labor needs, and other factors. It sets expectations for the ROI timeline and builds the investment case for executives.
2. Design and Prototyping
This phase configures SAP S/4HANA Cloud environments based on processes finalized during planning and uses the platform's flexibility to address legacy constraints. Prototyping proves that end-to-end processes are designed to meet business needs before a full-scale rollout.
Key S/4HANA Cloud environments provisioned include a sandbox, development, test, training, staging and production with model company templates helping accelerate setup. Platform configuration leverages business process intelligence within the S/4HANA Cloud to adapt workflows, interfaces and rules without coding.
Integration capabilities enable connecting S/4HANA Cloud to peripheral SAP applications, third-party systems and custom extensions. Automation features help retire legacy customizations by configuring S/4HANA Cloud to address those use cases out-of-the-box wherever feasible or through bolt-ons.
Prototyping use case scenarios across each business process area to achieve testing configurations and integrations for an entire business process area. Business stakeholders participate in user acceptance testing to validate S/4HANA Cloud trials and only migrate actual data when the trials have met their requirements.
3. Data Migration
With S/4HANA Cloud environments ready, this phase executes the data migration strategy finalized during planning. Master data, transactional information and custom app data are systematically extracted from legacy SAP systems, then validated, cleansed, transformed and loaded into the cloud.
Migration tools perform bulk data transfers, such as master records for materials, customers, vendors, employees and organizational entities, and open transactions for purchase orders, sales orders, invoices, payments, etc. Some data may require manual intervention to resolve quality errors.
Any data housed in legacy custom applications must also be migrated using conversion routines. Archival data that doesn't need to remain active on S/4HANA Cloud can be retired. Confirming information accuracy via reconciliation reports ensures migration reliability before decommissioning legacy systems.
4. Testing and Training
The testing and training phase involves moving business processes from one role to another and workstream to workstream to S/4HANA Cloud to ensure a smooth adoption before the full production launch. Structured training helps employees become productive in the new SAP cloud environment.
Integration testing confirms synchronized workflows between S/4HANA Cloud and peripheral SAP modules, third-party apps, custom extensions and migrated data. Scenario testing validates configurations that meet expected requirements with test cases mirroring daily operations, exceptions and seasonal peak processing volumes.
End-user testing involves people from different roles who perform hands-on walkthroughs of key workflows on S/4HANA Cloud and provide feedback. Training courses cover process and policy changes, navigating Fiori interfaces, personalized roles, transactional processing, reporting and self-service configuration.
5. Go-Live and Support
Finally, at the go-live stage, BOPs create a path for business operations to transition from legacy SAP systems across modules and functions from one location to another by orchestrating through several modules, functions and locations. Continuity is ensured during the switch, and platform stability and performance are optimized.
Go-live planning coordinates cutover events across finance, supply chain, manufacturing, sales and HR processes. Dress rehearsals confirm operational readiness. Technical support and business continuity plans prevent disruptions. Some organizations phase production launches across business units.
After migration, ongoing support helps optimize processes, interfaces, and extensions on the S/4HANA Cloud. Performance monitoring and issue resolution are key workflows also deployed to maintain peak seasonal processing stability. Guided by the expert, the usage of platform capabilities is maximized, and capabilities evolve as the user's needs change over time.
Extensive testing and training before 'go live' and technical and business support help organizations migrate smoothly to S/4HANA Cloud from legacy premise SAP environments. Providing an innovation, agility, and simplified operations platform is the future-proof platform for IT leaders.
Tailoring SAP Cloud Migration for Small and Mid-Sized Enterprises
While large enterprises gain tremendous value from migrating their on-premise SAP environments to the cloud, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) also have much to benefit from. However, SMBs' concerns and constraints differ from those of their larger counterparts. By tailoring their migration strategy, SMBs can effectively transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Streamlined Processes
Unlike large corporations with complex global supply chains, SMBs often have more straightforward operations centered around several core processes, such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay and record-to-report. This allows SMBs to take advantage of S/4HANA Cloud's preconfigured best practice process templates to streamline workflows.
Accelerated Time-to-Value
SMBs can migrate from on-premise systems and configure a limited set of cloud capabilities to meet their needs, leveraging fewer customizations and integrations. By skipping over the older versions and jumping straight to S/4HANA Cloud, SMBs gain time-to-value.
Cost Savings
The pay-as-you-go subscription model and no 'on-premise' infrastructure cost allow SMBs to lower their overall TCO and reinvest the savings into innovation initiatives. Since SMBs are smaller organizations, they tend to be more sensitive to the large upfront capital expenses of on-premise solutions.
Two-Step Migration
Given their smaller data volumes and less complex landscapes, SMBs can take a two-step approach to migration. First, they can quickly move core modules like finance, procurement and sales order management to the cloud. Second, they can address peripheral applications. This will focus initial testing resources on mission-critical processes.
Hands-on Testing Support
While large enterprises have expansive IT teams to handle testing and training for cloud migration, SMBs have more limited personnel bandwidth. Leveraging implementation experts that offer testing factories and hands-on training accelerates SMB's path to production readiness on S/4HANA Cloud.
Ongoing Optimization
Post-go-live, SMBs continue to benefit from built-in automation and analytics within S/4HANA Cloud, which drive process optimization over time through continuous improvement cycles. Expert guidance helps SMBs keep pace with platform innovation.
To sum up, SAP offers flexible cloud solutions for the needs of both small and large companies. The versatility of S/4HANA Cloud makes it suitable for any enterprise, regardless of size, as it differentiates itself from other migration tools in the market. SMBs can successfully migrate to SAP's intelligent suite of cloud solutions with the right strategy focused on their specific needs.
Best Practices for a Successful Migration to SAP on Cloud
Migrating from complex, entrenched on-premise SAP systems to the cloud represents a major transformational undertaking for any enterprise. Careful planning and execution and applying proven methodologies help ensure a smooth transition that meets timeline, budget, and business objectives.
Secure Executive Commitment
Gaining ongoing executive sponsorship across lines of business ensures alignment with the imperative and urgency of the move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It also drives the securement of needed budgets and resources. Establishing governance and change management processes upfront institutes accountability across the transition program.
Assemble a Cross-Functional Team
A strong blend of business, IT and functional experts must collaborate on the initiative. Business process owners define optimal workflows enabled by the move to the cloud. Technical specialists assess integration touchpoints. Key user representatives validate designs meet practical needs and change impact. External experts provide cloud migration and SAP cloud advisory.
Prioritize Business Scenarios
The most important aspect of the migration effort is to transition the core business scenarios, workflows and system touchpoints to provide the maximum value. It means selecting the priority processes and applications to migrate in phases. In most cases, trying to take a Big Bang approach is very cost-prohibitive and very risky.
Leverage SAP Tools and Migration Methodology
SAP offers proven tools and methodologies for customers to migrate from legacy SAP systems to S/4HANA Cloud. These accelerators simplify the migration execution and cover business process planning, technical assessment, sandbox prototyping, data migration utilities, template testing and go-live playbooks.
Define Success Metrics Upfront
It enables the objectives to be clarified in tangible success metrics like ROI, the total cost of migration, a timeline for delivery of process and TCO targets, business continuity, productivity impact and platform adoption. Additionally, it is capable of quantifying realized outcomes from the program after going live.
Invest in Training and Change Management
Business users need proper training on re-engineered processes and new interfaces in S/4HANA Cloud to drive adoption. In addition, technical teams need to be equipped to administer, secure, and support the cloud platform. Proactive change management and internal marketing are used to smooth the transition.
Overcoming Key Challenges in Migrating to SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Any major IT transformation initiative comes with inherent challenges that must be mitigated in order to achieve success. Migrating core ERP processes and data from on-premise SAP to S/4HANA Cloud is no exception. Some of the major hurdles that enterprises face include:
- Data Migration Complexity. Moving large volumes of transactional and master data from legacy systems to the cloud is complicated, and it requires handling issues like data quality, transformation, and reconciliation. However, the validation and movement of information to the new platform are simplified through the use of SAP-qualified migration tools and utilities.
- Integration Disruption. Essential systems are tightly coupled, so a change in any single touchpoint interface impacts other areas. Therefore, integration testing, adjustment time, and good API change management are necessary. SAP supplies templates and best practices for integration management.
- Custom Code Retirement. Heavily customized systems require simplification of custom objects, interfaces, extensions, forms, and reports. This ensures ongoing agility, updates and supportability. Taking an incremental, phased approach to decommissioning unnecessary customizations enables continuity.
- User Adoption Resistance. Major business processes and user experience changes often cause productivity to decline initially, but only after improvements. End users are eased through the transition by addressing the change impact through training, communication, and familiarization periods.
- Resource and Expertise Shortfalls. New cloud platforms utilize different technologies, architectures, and administration tools than legacy systems. Reskilling teams and augmenting with outside specialists experienced in SAP S/4HANA cloud migration closes competency gaps.
By proactively anticipating these types of migration obstacles, enterprises can incorporate effective mitigation activities into the program plan. Leveraging SAP advisory services and best practices helps accelerate learning curves. With concerted change leadership and project governance, organizations can successfully traverse the challenges on the journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Conclusion
To sum up, migrating from expensive and rigid on-premise SAP environments to the flexible and dynamic SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a strategic imperative for companies that want to adopt a better competitive approach in highly dynamic and turbulent markets. Moving to the cloud is crucial to assessing and responding quickly to seize opportunities or address competitive threats. In addition, it empowers them to pursue aggressive, innovation-driven growth based on the cutting-edge capabilities of artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, automation and the Internet of Things deployed on the cloud platform.
In addition to reducing ballooning TCO burdens, unreliability risks and complexities of legacy SAP systems, transitioning to S/4HANA Cloud is just as important. By leveraging proven cloud migration methodologies described earlier, coupled with SAP's migration tools and preconfigured solutions, an easy transition to the future-proof S/4HANA Cloud environment with business outcomes can be made.
